Jesus, Debt, and Society: Bringing David Graeber into Dialogue with Social-Scientific Research into the Historical Jesus

This article delves into David Graeber’s references to Jesus’s teaching and to some early Christian texts contained in Debt (2011) in order to bring Graeber’s approach into dialogue with scholarly research (especially social-scientific studies) on the historical Jesus and his movement. This enables one to explore the implications of Graeber’s ideas for the study of such topics and offers the opportunity to contribute to the study of the historical Jesus’s thoughts on debt relief, the «kingdom of God», and its relation to human society, as they can be pieced together from texts such as Matthew 18,23-34 and 6,12. Graeber’s conclusions are compared with the analyses of scholars attentive to the sociohistorical and culturalanthropological background of Jesus’s parables. Jesus employed the imagery of the kingdom of God to also promote a social transformation; Graeber (although offering some stimulating thoughts) does not sufficiently take into account the discontinuity between Jesus and his followers, and the later allegorization of certain Jesus’s teachings.